Costa Carvalho, MagdaHaynes, J.Kennedy, D.Osgood, JayneRijke, Victoria de2026-05-132026-05-132025Costa Carvalho, Magda, Haynes, J., & Kennedy, D. (2025). Stretching and sketching playful writing with Companion Creatures: childing professional development. In J. Osgood and V. Rijke (eds.). Postdevelopmental Approaches to Play. Bloomsbery, pp. 79-100.9781350439474http://hdl.handle.net/10400.3/8954Tantalized by the invitation to join in the creation of this edited collection about post-developmental approaches to play, we felt an opportunity to experiment not only with post-developmental ideas, but also with post-developmental styles and structures, and with emergent approaches to the process of collaborative writing. This was often difficult and sometimes we floundered, unsure of our ground. While more than willing to deviate, it was still not the way we were mostly accustomed to writing in our seemingly mature and structured academic lives. And the three of us had not written something together before, although we had talked a lot about child and philosophy. In writing this chapter, there was a strong feeling of reconnecting with dormant sensibilities. Thus, a permanent sense of tension arose between the wide awake and self conscious process of producing a piece on post-developmental approaches to play according to academic guidelines (the structure of a chapter), and the urge and will to disturb those expectations by running away from tacit, developmentality-shaped ways of working (towards unstructured play). Writing post-developmentally about play could not be a non-playful task. It could not be too serious. We needed to engage in a kind of frolic and, only then, could we respond to the challenge. We wanted to experiment with this shared writing as a somehow tentative, hesitant, especially non-purpose-driven, back-and-forth experience, rather than a sequential and fully planned activity. And this is indeed how it turned out. Unexpectedly. Writing together as playing together.engplaypostdevelopmentprofessional developmentlisteningbook partrestricted access